Reshuffling towards defeat
Tony Blair’s reshuffle, following disastrous local election results, has the smell of the bunker about it. Does he intend to bring the party and government down with him? [More >>>]
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A week in Paris AFK
Ephems is off to Paris tomorrow for a week ‘Away From Keyboard’, or AFK, as the knowing anoraks say. No more new posts after today; no more comments on comments, however misguided (or provocative or laudatory). Ephems will spend the week basking, not in the sun (the forecast is for almost continuous showers) but in the warm glow of being awarded pride of place in last week’s Britblogs of The Week for a recent post. Thanks for that, Tim.
Ministerial resignations: Charles Clarke, Lord Carrington and the Falklands [1]
Contrary to the received wisdom, Lord Carrington’s resignation over the Falklands war was not a case of a minister resigning as a penance for the misdeeds of his officials, as often asserted recently in the Charles Clarke context [More >>>]
Deportation instead of jail, not after it? Bad idea
A comment on an earlier post asks why we can’t save money by deporting foreign nationals who commit crimes straight away instead of only at the end of their sentences. I suggest six reasons why not [More >>>]
Goodbye to ministerial responsibility
The home secretary uses ‘responsibility’ in two opposite senses in his struggle to keep his job [More >>>]
The man in the White House
The immortal H L Mencken makes a prediction about the Presidency of the US [More >>>]
The Times Style Guide begs a question (or not)
The London Times Style Guide corrects one misuse of ‘beg the question’, only to impose another which, being commoner, is even worse [More >>>]
The Guardian and faith schools: for or against?
It’s tempting to speculate that the weird ambiguity on faith schools in the Guardian’s Good Friday editorial might be deliberate, despite Polly’s assault on them on an earlier page [More >>>]
Pssst: The power of the Israel lobby in the US
A well-sourced article revealing the power of the Israel lobby in the US and published, not in the US but in the UK’s LRB, has raised a storm of accusations of anti-semitism, confirming a main thesis of the article [More]